Storyboard, page 9
“Yes. I’ve found that.”
“Where do you yourself stand, as they say?”
“On advertising? Well, I don’t know—the orthodox left-wing view, I suppose. It’s not really my field, so I haven’t thought much about it.”
“Bodge was saying he thought it was time we did something.” (Harvey Bodge was the editor of The Radical.) “He thinks it corrupts the people, and corrupts the language, and the people are more corrupted because the language is corrupted, and the language is more corrupted because the people are corrupted. Something like that. So he’s against it for political and literary reasons.”
“Bit extreme, isn’t it?”
“Don’t ask me. If I were doing an investigation, I might take it as a working hypothesis, and see what came out. Do you have the entrée to advertising circles?”
Ralph thought of Sophia. “More or less,” he said. “A very minor one, if I care to use it.”
“There isn’t any hurry, but I think Bodge might want some kind of factual thing. He likes to feel that even with our high advertising revenue, we do keep our integrity. Silly really. Who doubts it? Integrity’s our stock-in-trade. Still, do you think you could do something?”
“I don’t mind. As long as it is factual. I’m a scholar, not a polemicist.”
“My dear fellow, he wouldn’t want anything but facts. Bodge always says he hasn’t any use for polemic. He leaves that to the Tories. You’ll find he’s a great one for the exercise of responsible judgment.”
*
Hugh knew that Christian had been consulted about the Foundation Soap problem. Even if Keith Bates and Don Wallace had not each of them warned him, the members of the Copy Department usually did know when Christian was on the poach; he was so devious at these times, and so delighted with himself. Desmond Bast, the TV producer, began to take on an attitude of detachment from the creative work, reminding everyone that his was basically an executant’s function within the Creative Group, and Fidge Randolph came unhappily to Hugh, and said, “I hear Christian’s asked Stefan to do something, but I don’t know what it is.”
Hugh said mildly, “It’s a difficult problem, Fidge. I don’t see why P.A. shouldn’t consult whom he likes. I thought I’d ask Christian to a meeting some time. We ought to pool our ideas a bit, I think, don’t you? I mean we’re always being told to pull together in the Agency and that sort of thing, and that what matters is the advertising, not who does it, and I suppose that’s true really—if anything matters, that is, which I’m bound to say I sometimes doubt. There’s a lot of background stuff we could give Christian if he wanted it, but you know, working on Hoppness, after a bit one does begin to melt into the background. Christian’s probably got a lot to contribute, as they say. He can give us a new view.”
“He’ll do that all right. But if you think we’re going to see what it is until the presentation, you’re wrong. Christian doesn’t work that way.” And Fidge went grumpily back to his own office. There he looked at the lay-outs, neat and, as it now seemed to him, rather ordinary in their cardboard mounts. He lit a cigarette, and stood over them, brooding. “It’s what Hoppness want,” he said to himself. “I ought to know that by now.” Ash dropped from his cigarette on to the top layout, and he was too depressed to blow it off. Facing him, as it hung on the wall in a discreet grey frame, was one of his own water-colours; it was of fishing boats in a Breton harbour, and had been exhibited by the Royal Society of Painters in Water-colours. That’s the sort of thing I ought to be doing, Fidge thought. If the Group were to meet Christian on his own ground, the lay-outs would have to be tarted up in some way. There was no time to do much. In any case, what could he do?—they were as they were. Gloomily he began to stick a sheet of cellophane over the surface of the top lay-out. If it even looked glossy, that might do something.
As for Christian, he could not be reached that day, and when Hugh managed to get him on the telephone next morning, he agreed enthusiastically that they must certainly meet. “What about Thursday morning? I could give you any time on Thursday morning,” he said.
Hugh said that the meeting with P.A. had been fixed for Wednesday afternoon.
“Has it? I get so confused about dates. Yes, there it is in my little book. What a pity! Never mind. Let’s meet afterwards, and have a gruesome old post-mortem about it. All boys together, and no account executives allowed.”
So Hugh said he would like that very much, and put down the phone.
The presentation to the Account Group was conducted with the formal informality which the Agency applied to its more important affairs.
It was made in P.A.’s office. Marketing and Media were not present. Somehow—and certainly without any deliberate arrangement by P.A.’s secretary—the chairs had become regrouped since their last meeting. Keith and Tony Barstow sat together at one side of P.A.’ s desk. At the far end of the room, facing the desk, were Copy and Art—Hugh and Sophia sitting together on the sofa, and Fidge on a straight chair beside them. Desmond Bast had set up his chair on the middle ground between them and the Account Group. Christian sat by himself against the window wall in the only chair with arms. Sophia noted heavy-heartedly that he had brought a tape-recorder.
Hugh said, “Here we are as usual, sitting around for P.A. Shall we pin things up, Fidge, or wait till he comes?”
“Better wait till he comes. Then you can talk about them.”
Tony Barstow said, “Review the thinking before you expose the advertising, eh?”
“Oh dear! I’m never very good at that. I think people just ought to look at things, and ask questions if they feel like it.”
P.A. came quickly into the room. “What—late am I?” It was his invariable opening. “All here?” What would happen, Sophia wondered, if some day they weren’t all there. She supposed that P.A. would just go back to the loo until they were. “Let’s get started then.”
Hugh said, “P.A., we’ve brought you some advertising.”
“Good! Good! Let’s see it.”
“We’ve been thinking about it rather a lot. We had some ideas. I don’t know if they’re any good. I hope so. We thought you’d like to see them.”
Hugh stopped speaking, and glanced about him deprecatingly. “Have you got everything, Sophia?” he said. The television scripts and the copy for the press advertisements had been typed on white paper, with five carbon copies of each, and lay in Sophia’s lap as a little pile on top of the storyboards. These storyboards were an attempt to express the television scripts visually without actually making a film; Fidge’s assistant had drawn a series of pictures, beneath which the words of the script were set out to match the action. Since storyboards reduce what is an unbroken sequence of movements in time to the dimension of a series of flat pictures in space, they are not at all a satisfactory way of expressing a television script, but they are useful for explaining very roughly what is going to happen on screen to those clients who lack a visual imagination. Their chief disadvantage is that those clients who lack any imagination at all are likely to complain when the finished commercial doesn’t look exactly like the storyboard.
Hugh said, “I’m not sure I’ve got anything particular to say. Perhaps we could just pin things up and pass things round, and get some reactions. If you had any questions, I suppose I could try to answer them. Or Fidge could. Or Sophia.”
“You said you had some ideas. What ideas?”
“Oh, the usual ideas, I suppose, P.A. I mean, we’re launching a new product, so we thought perhaps something exciting would do for a start. Fidge, will you …? And Sophia …? Thank you. Just the launch advertisements to begin with. We could look at the Going Campaign later.” Sophia gave P.A. the top copies, and passed round the carbons. When she reached Christian, he winked at her, and this added a feeling of guilt to her feeling of depression. Fidge produced his first lay-out, covered with cellophane and mounted in cardboard, and pinned it to the asbestos-covered board on the wall behind him. The cellophane caught the light, and P.A. said, “Bit shiny, isn’t it, Fidge? I can’t see a bloody thing from here.”
Christian said, “Glossy pictures for the national press? You naughty, imaginative old Fidge! You know it won’t reproduce on newsprint.”
“It was just to keep them clean,” Fidge said, hating Christian. “It’s often done, you know.”
“Oh, I thought for a moment you were thinking of launching in Vogue” Christian left his seat, and came to look at the lay-out. “But I see you’re not.”
P.A. left his desk, and stood beside Christian in front of the lay-out. The Account Group followed him decorously. The four of them stood there like critics at a Private View, two wise, and one well-meaning, and one who had strayed from the Motoring Page. Hugh, Fidge and Sophia moved aside, and Desmond stayed where he was, still disassociating in a tactful way. “What’s the copy say again?” P.A. asked, “I left my bit of paper on the desk.”
Hugh took his spectacles from the top pocket of his gray jacket, put them on slowly, and focused on the rather blurred carbon Sophia had given him. “Exciting! New! At last! For you!” he said anxiously. “Petal—the new Improved Cosmetic Soap.”
“I can see that. Fidge has got all that. I don’t want the headline; I’m not blind. What about the body copy?”
“Here is an exciting new beauty discovery, the last word in toilet luxury——”
“Toilet! Sounds like a lavatory seat.”
“It’s a little difficult to read, I’m afraid. Is this ‘toilet’ or ‘toilette’, Sophia?”
“Toilet.”
“Yes, well perhaps it does have a double meaning; I don’t know. One never sees these things at the time. Shall I go on?”
“Please.”
“‘Petal, the new Improved Cosmetic Soap, gives you that For-Ever Charm, means that now there is never a time you need to be without beauty.’ As I expect you notice, P.A., we’ve picked that up from the competition’s advertising. It’s what they call an intentional echo, I believe. ‘That’s because only Petal contains the thirty-two essential oils your skin needs. Other soaps remove these oils. Petal restores them. Only Petal has the deep-cream cleansing action, deeper than ordinary soap, more nourishing than ordinary cream. And Petal washes in beauty as it washes out dirt. Glycerine-mild Petal comes in five delicate shades, each specially selected to catch the tones of your very special complexion. Wild Rose for the girl who leads an outdoor life——’ I thought perhaps Wild Rose instead of English Rose, P.A. We’ve changed them all a little in that way. There’s Peaches ‘n Cream instead of Radiant Peach, Flowering Cherry instead of Apple Blossom, Lotus instead of Magnolia, and Flamenco instead of Gypsy. I think they’re all improvements really, don’t you?”
P.A. said, “What are you going to do in television?”
“Much the same sort of thing. We thought——” And Hugh explained about the symbolic annoucement sequence, the appearance of the soap wraped and unwrapped, the essential ingredients (most of thm imported), the soap in use with a special reference to deep-cream cleansing, about how the Group had decided in a bold way not to mention that it left no ring round the bowl since all new soaps could say that, about the end-result as shown privately in detail by the mirror and publicly in breathtaking loveliness at a night club. “And then we finish with a jingle Sophia wrote,” he said. “It’s rather short, I’m afraid. It goes, ‘Petal! Petal! For you!’ on a sort of rising note. I think we all felt there ought to be a jingle, but that was all there was time for.”
“Keith, what do you think?”
It was the part of a presentation such as this that Keith most hated. Advertising was too fragile for this; one oughtn’t to be asked for opinions in front of everybody. Advertising ought to be what for much of the time it was, Keith thought, just people talking things over amongst themselves, making suggestions here, tiny alterations there, saying, “You see, it’s like this, Keith,” and, “We thought we’d ask you to have a look at this while it’s still rough, Keith,” and Keith would say, “Well, if you really feel I’ve got something to contribute,” and people would say, “Of course you have. This is a team business, and we wanted to get you in early.”
So Keith didn’t care for Plans Boards, or Review Boards, or Presentations to the Account Group. He felt that there was a lack of any real comradeship at these meetings, even though everybody was careful to use Christian names, and there would be tea at four or coffee at eleven. If he were to back this campaign of Hugh’s (and he was pretty sure it was the sort of thing Hoppness wanted), P.A. would be annoyed, he knew. And if he were to attack it, Hugh would be hurt. So he only said, “I think it’s bang on the Hoppness formula, P.A.,” and hoped this didn’t commit him either way.
“Tony?”
Tony Barstow was young, well-born, stupid, and in his stupid way, ambitious. He knew that to have worked for Hoppness increased his market-value as an Account Executive, but he didn’t intend to do it for longer than he could help, because he couldn’t understand the jargon. He had no objection to hurting Hugh or to pleasing P.A. He said, “I think it’s a bit dull myself. Speaking off the cuff.”
“Christian?”
Christian said, “Of course it is. It’s bloody dull. So it should be. I’m on Hugh’s side. He can tell by now what sort of stuff they want at Hoppness, and here it is. If I know Hugh, he hates doing it, but I suppose it’s got to be done. Fidge too. I mean, take that television commercial. It’s exactly like every other Hoppness commercial you ever saw. The public won’t know the difference, and nor will the trade. Only, after they’ve been living with the advertising three or four times a week for six months, they’ll find they’ve got into the habit of buying the soap, and there it’ll be for ever and ever with a threepence-off band round it or a give-away offer, happily hogging the market. Eh, Hugh? Isn’t that right, Fidge?”
Hugh said, “Well, I’m not sure…. I thought perhaps…. We did include that sort of symbolic bit at the beginning to give it some distinction, and cosmetic appeal, and all that. Of course, that’s the bit they’ll probably want to cut to get the ring round the bowl back in.”
P.A. said, “What about you, Christian? I asked you to think about this problem because I wanted a new angle on it. Well, Hugh’s given us the old angle. He may be right. What about you?”
Christian said, “I did do something, but I’m not sure I want to show it, P.A. It’s too off-beam, I think. When I talked to the Marketing people, I got the idea that this stuff would go out through chemists. But if it’s just going to be the usual Hoppness outlets——”
“What do you mean? Of course it’s going out through chemists. That’s our recommendation. Put this stuff into grocery outlets, and you’ll downgrade it.”
“Oh!”
Keith said, “They haven’t actually accepted that recommendation, P.A. They’re still considering it in terms of the general marketing strategy. They were going to give me some kind of preliminary opinion on it next week.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Christian, what have you got to show?”
Christian was at ease. He returned to his seat by the window. “Well, nothing so clear cut, I’m afraid,” he said. “I haven’t been working as hard as Hugh’s Group, partly because I’m naturally lazy, and partly because I’ve got too much else to do. Fidge, I wonder if you’d mind taking those lay-outs of yours down for a moment? We can always put them back again, later, if we really want to. I’ve got some bits of paper I’d like to pin up. And a tape. All very rough. Not finished like yours. No cellophane, Fidge, so they’re probably not even clean any more. All I wanted to do was set a sort of mood, you see. Old stuff really—not new at all, P.A.—as old as your approach, Hugh, but new for Hoppness. I asked Stefan to do me one or two things. I knew you wouldn’t mind, Fidge. He was telling me he gets very bored, and I know you’re overworked, so I didn’t want to bother you with them.” He took two lay-outs from a green folder, and pinned them to the board. They were very large, much larger than the size in which they might be expected eventually to appear, and Stefan had covered the mounts with newspaper, a device which contrived to make the lay-outs themselves seem even more striking and original than they were already. They were two treatments of the same theme. On neither were there any words. “Very rough. Just scribbles really,” Christian said. “We haven’t bothered about copy or a headline or anything. Just the idea.” Roughly, strongly drawn in ink on cartridge paper, two women faced each other. Except that, Sophia saw, they were not two women, but rather two aspects of the same woman. On the left, she stood all virginal, her hair loose, her eyes clear. A heavy blue (was it poster paint or pastel?—pastel by the texture) covered the garment she wore, which was more a robe than an ordinary dress, and which flowed down to the bottom of the picture where it met and mingled with the heavy gold brocade of the ball-gown of the girl on the right. And this girl—this woman—this woman-girl—the twin of the other—wore her hair short, and stood there poised, confident, her eyes demure, in her sophisticated expensive dress, as beautiful as her other self and certainly not profane, as innocent indeed, but worldly with it, for both aspects of the girl in the lay-out represented an ideal. On one of the lay-outs, dawn and midnight gave a kind of background. On the other, blobs and splotches of blue and gold ink, scratchings and hatchings of black lines, combined to make a texture. “Just the feeling of the thing,” Christian said, and switched on the tape-recorder.
Sophia had heard the voice somewhere before on some Third Programme play with musique concrète. So Christian had tapped his friends for talent. It was a good voice, she thought, both what people called “warm” and what people called “cool”—some confusion about words there! Well then, it was a relaxed voice, limpid, forming the words and dropping them into time like pebbles in a pool. And it was also a friendly voice, warm in that way, speaking directly to you about something which mattered. This is what it said:
